'Friends' Deal Will Pay Each Of Its 6 Stars $22 Million

By BILL CARTER

Published: February 12, 2002

NBC and the Warner Brothers television studio concluded the biggest deal ever for a half-hour television program last night, a one-year renewal for the comedy ''Friends'' that will exceed the per half-hour price the network paid for ''E.R.'' in 1998.

The deal will bring back the entire six-person cast for what is being called the last season of the series, and it will pay each one a salary of $1 million an episode -- a total of $22 million a season if the show produces the expected 22 episodes.

The deal underscored the critical position ''Friends'' holds on NBC's prime-time schedule. This season the show has rebounded from what seemed to be a steady decline over the last several seasons to score its biggest ratings in five years -- and the biggest in all of television. A relieved Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment said, ''This is a great day.''

For the networks, the increasing prices being paid to long-running comedy hits like ''Friends'' and ''Frasier'' are a further indication of how dependent the networks have become on keeping their aging hits on the air, especially in comedy. No recent comedy series has been able to approach the success of ''Frasier,'' ''Friends'' and ''Everybody Loves Raymond,'' all of which began in the mid-1990's.

Though exact terms were not disclosed, executives involved in the negotiations said that NBC would pay $7 million an episode. NBC had set the record for hourlong shows in 1998 when it agreed to pay Warner Brothers $13 million an episode -- or $6.5 million per half-hour -- for ''E.R.''

In addition to the $1 million-an-episode salary, the six regular cast members will each continue to receive some portion of the show's syndication profits, a benefit they gained in the show's last renegotiation, two years ago. That financial benefit has in the past only been given out to stars who had ownership rights in a show, like Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby.

NBC and Warner Brothers have shared in some of the salary costs in the past and will likely do so again in the new deal, one executive with knowledge of the contracts said. In the deal signed two years ago, the show's six stars, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer, each received salaries of $750,000 an episode.

Of that total, NBC paid $700,000 each, Warner Brothers paid $25,000, and the show's production company, Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, paid the other $25,000 each, the executive said. NBC also paid the entire production cost of the series, estimated at more than $1 million.

NBC executives said the network paid a total of $5.5 million an episode for the last two seasons of ''Friends,'' so the $7 million figure represents an increase of 27 percent.

But NBC executives conceded that they had to have the show back. In the past, some of the cast members, especially Mr. Schwimmer and Ms. Kudrow, had expressed a desire to move on, and as recently as last summer the current season was expected to be the last for the show.

The revival in the ratings clearly changed that expectation. In a statement attributed to all the cast members, they said, ''We could not ignore the outpouring of public support for the show.''

One indication of NBC's concern about whether this might truly be the last season for the show was the early completion of the renewal negotiations, which were led by Scott Sassa, NBC's president of West Coast operations, and Mr. Zucker. Two previous ''Friends'' negotiations had gone down to the last minute, not being signed until NBC was about to announce a new season's schedule.

This time NBC executives had decided it was essential to know early whether the show would be back in order to prepare for some kind of finale if the cast had decided to walk away. There were four scripts yet to be written in the current season.

Several senior executives from rival networks said NBC would have faced a serious crisis had the network lost ''Friends.'' ''It is totally vital to their up-front sales,'' one network executive said, referring to the advertising sales that take place in the spring, in which sponsors buy up the majority of network commercial time.

With ''Friends'' secured, the executive said, NBC, which will easily win the current season in the young adult categories, can once again dominate the up-front sales.

The addition of one more year also means that NBC gets one more chance to deliver the show's enormous audience to a new comedy placed behind it on the schedule, an effort that NBC executives concede has been the network's biggest failure in recent years.

''Friends,'' which plays at 8 p.m., is the signature show on NBC's signature night, Thursday. No show NBC has developed in the last eight years has shown any sign that it could replace ''Friends,'' or even come close to it in terms of popularity, especially among the young adult viewers advertisers most want to reach.

This season ''Friends'' is averaging a total of 24.7 million viewers each week, television's biggest weekly audience by more than 2 million viewers. Even more important to NBC from a financial point of view is the 12 rating the show scores among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, representing more than 15 million viewers, by far the best number in television in that category.

NBC executives had expressed great concern about going into next season without the ratings punch generated each week by ''Friends,'' especially after the show bounced back from what seemed to be fading ratings at the end of last season.

At that point ''Friends'' was being beaten regularly by the CBS hit ''Survivor.'' But with new plot lines and writing that critics praised as among the best the show has produced during its run, ''Friends'' turned the tables on ''Survivor,'' beating it every week this season.